The Linux Foundation is set to release a report on Wednesday estimating that the Linux ecosystem is now worth $25 billion. Despite the large number, Internetnews seems to think that the number is low compared to IDG's predicted estimate of $49 billion by year 2011. We just have to wait and see, for more details.

Here at OSNews, we use a moderation system where your peers rate your comments, and where the OSNews staff rarely intervene. This system was put in place after realising that the editorial moderation was failing miserably; it had become too much work. Sifting through ten reported comments a day is one thing, sifting through 100 of them each day is another. The result was that editorial moderation had become willy-nilly, which led to understandable user frustration, and pointless email rants back and forth between users and staff members (mea culpa). The answer to this problem turned out to be a two-step process: banning anonymous commenting, and our peer moderation system. While the moderation system has its flaws, it has exceeded all of our expectations in making sure that our comments' sections are free of spam, and relatively fun to read. Still, we realise problems exist, but we also see a lot of misinformation floating around. The treat we have in store for you today will help in fixing some of that.

Qt Software today announced the porting of Qt to S60 on Symbian OS, the open smartphone platform. With the inclusion of the S60 platform, developers have an additional 80 million target devices that they can support with their Qt-based applications. An early technical preview of Qt for S60 is available for download from Qt Software current website.

While Ext4 was originally merged in 2.6.19, it was marked as a development filesystem. It has been a long time coming but as planned, Ext4dev has been renamed to Ext4 in 2.6.28 to indicate its level of maturity and paving the way for production level deployments. Ext4 filesystem developer Ted Tso also endorsed Btrfs as a multi-vendor, next generation filesystem and along with the interest from Andrew Morton, Btrfs is planned to be merged before 2.6.29 is released. It will follow a similar development process to Ext4 and be initially marked as development only.

Computer world points out five major new features , you might have missed out in the recent 2.6.27 release. These include briefly, better wireless and webcam support, UBIFS filesytem for embedded devices, Ext4 filesystem with better performance and scalability and increased support for network devices as well.

Even though Snow Leopard is supposed to be all about tweaking and performance, AppleInsider claims to have some information regarding new features coming in Snow Leopard. They claim Apple is working on bringing Exchange support to iCal, Address Book, and Mail, a feature called ImageBoot, and - insert drum roll - a new Finder written in Cocoa. Testers also claim that other bundled applications are written in Cocoa. This isn't all that weird seeing Carbon doesn't come in a 64bit flavour.

A new version of MikeOS, a simple 16-bit assembly operating system designed to teach basic OS design and implementation, is now available. It features FAT12 file writing, a new mouse driver, a C library and other changes. As always, the Handbook provides copious info on the OS and how to start OS development yourself.

"Krusader is a massively powerful and feature-packed twin panel file manager. If you dislike bloat and prefer minimalist windows managers like XFCE or Fluxbox, the good news is that Krusader will run without KDE, provided you have the necessary libraries installed. If Dolphin isn't cutting the mustard Krusader might just be what you've been looking for." Here is the download page for Krusader, give it a spin and share your comments.

Kexec is a feature that allows to boot kernels from a working kernel. It was originally intended for use by kernel and system developers who had to reboot several times a day. Soon, system administrators for high-availability servers found use for it as well. As systems get more and more advanced, and boot times get longer, end users can now benefit from it.

Microsoft says it has released its new embedded operating system for x86-based devices to product manufacturers. Windows Embedded Standard 2009 eschews Vista, instead combining Windows XP codebase updates with new versions of Internet Explorer, RDP (remote desktop protocol), Windows Media Player, and .NET, according to the company.

Are you looking for an open source, Web-based e-mail and groupware suite with its own development framework, Ajax interface, more than 50 applications, an active developer community, and millions of end users all over the world? The Horde communication and collaboration suite may not be as well known as the big name commercial offerings, but according to lead developer and release manager Jan Schneider it has just as much to offer, and more.

Windows Vista is everyone's favorite tech punching bag, and not without reason. But the reviled operating system has some amazing potential and with some tweaks and a few utilities, you can do what Redmond didn't: make Vista great.

The news of OpenOffice.org's third major release has generated quite a bit of buzz on the internet for many reasons, one of which being that it now runs natively on a Mac (sans X11). ZDnet has posted a screenshot gallery of OpenOffice.org 3.0 for those who have yet to try the hot-off-the-press application.

It was announced yesterday that the Microsoft OS code-named Windows 7 will be shipping as "Windows 7," exciting and surprising many. There was much question, even in our own piece, as to how Microsoft arrived at 7 for an OS likely destined to be version 6.1. Microsoft answered our question in a post called "Why 7?" on the Windows Vista Blog.